Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot’s Egyptian vacation aboard a glamorous river steamer turns into a terrifying search for a murderer when a picture-perfect couple’s idyllic honeymoon is tragically cut short.
I was very impressed with Kenneth Branagh’s big-screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” in 2017, I had seen and was familiar with Sidney Lumet’s 1974 adaptation but Branagh brought an air of elegance and grandeur to his directorial outing that was sorely missing from its predecessor. At the end of Branagh’s “Murder on the Orient Express,” Hercule Poirot (Branagh) is informed by a British Army messenger about a “murder on the bloody Nile,” a case that he accepts and which leads us up to “Death on the Nile.”
As the story begins, we flash back to 1914 with Poirot serving in the army during World War I. After he is injured in an ambush, his face is revealed in the hospital to be slightly disfigured after he and some fellow soldiers were caught in a booby-trapped bridge explosion. When his soon-to-be-wife visits him, even though he specifically requested her not to, he shows her his face and asks her if she still wants to marry him, expecting her to recoil in horror but much to his surprise, she smiles at him, holds his hand, and says, “Grow a mustache!”
The story then moves forward to Egypt in 1937 with Poirot on vacation, sitting in front of the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx, drinking a cup of tea and eating a Jaffa Cake. Upon further inspection, he notices a man standing on one of the pyramids, flying a kite. He yells at the man to come down and when he does, he is pleasantly surprised when he realizes it is his old friend Bouc (Tom Bateman), whom he hasn’t seen in years. Bouc invites him back to meet his mother, Euphemia (Annette Bening), a renowned painter, at the hotel where they have been invited to be part of the honeymoon ceremony of recently married Linnet Ridgeway-Doyle and her husband Simon (Gal Gadot and Armie Hammer). When the seemingly happy couple sees Poirot in the crowd, they ask him to join them on their trip as they are big fans and he happily obliges.
Once aboard the S.S. Karnak, a Nile paddle steamer they have rented for themselves and their accompanying relatives and friends, an old flame of Simon’s, and Linnet’s ex-best friend Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey), appears and makes things very awkward for the couple. Linnet informs Poirot that Simon and Jacqueline were originally engaged before Jacqueline introduced her to Simon and they quickly fell in love, leaving Jacqueline behind. Now she turns up everywhere the couple goes. Later, when Poirot has a chance to talk to Jacqueline, she tells him that as soon as she and Simon met, she knew he was her soulmate and that she knows, deep down, that he still loves her. When Jacqueline gets into an altercation with Simon, she pulls out a gun and shoots him, wounding him in the leg. Mrs. Bowers (Dawn French), a nurse, and Linus Windlesham (Russell Brand), an aristocratic doctor, are quickly called to the scene. Mrs. Bowers takes Jacqueline, now in a delirious and hysterical state, back to her room while Linus attends to the wounded Simon.
The next morning, Poirot awakens and is informed of what transpired the night before but before he has his morning coffee, Linnet is found dead with a gunshot wound to the head. Naturally, all eyes fall on Jacqueline but Mrs. Bowers states she was with her all night long while Linus was with Simon. As the steamer is brought to a halt in the middle of the Nile, Poirot begins to question everyone on board but before the day is over, two more people will be dead. Now Poirot must rely on his world-renowned investigating techniques and crime-solving methods if he is to reveal who the killer is before anyone else perishes.
While I had seen the 1978 version, starring Peter Ustinov in the starring role, Branagh delivers a tale that feels fresh and invigorating, given that the source material is 85 years old. While the 1978 adaptation was shot primarily in Egypt, here, the middle eastern scenes were recreated in Morocco and in England at Longcross Studios in Surrey. It’s very difficult to tell them apart as Branagh’s second unit went to Egypt and actually filmed many of the landmarks that appear in the film but the majority of the story that takes place on the S.S. Karnak was filmed on a set.
Branagh, the director, never disappoints, and like “Murder on the Orient Express,” and his recent Oscar-nominated “Belfast,” fills the screen with a plethora of top-notch actors who deliver delicious, and, when called for, overly melodramatic performances that thankfully never veer into laughable, campy territory. The explanation for Poirot’s mustache, made clear at the beginning of the film, fittingly takes the focus off of it, and allows the audience to actually concentrate on the matters at hand, instead of on his whiskers. We also learn a little about Poirot’s past and on losing his wife and in one scene he shares with Emma Mackey, he remembers her by saying very little, instead, the camera remains focused on his face while his expressive eyes tell us just how much she meant to him. I could feel his loss, his sadness, the overwhelming feeling of losing the one person he was supposed to spend his life with, all through his eyes. Not an easy feat but one Branagh pulled off with great aplomb.
After the success of “Murder on the Orient Express,” I hope “Death on the Nile” finds similar prosperity because I would love to see Branagh return every few years with a new Poirot tale to tell. With Poirot having appeared in 33 novels, 2 plays, and more than 50 short stories, there is no shortage of material so Mr. Branagh has no excuse for not returning.
In Theaters Friday, February 11th
